The tax rise hasn’t just occurred since Brexit, but in part because of it. Having forfeited some economic growth by gumming up trade with its nearest and largest market, the UK has to tax more to fund the same level of state provision.
There is a paradox here that Leavers can chew over at their leisure.
Britain was at its most liberal and “Anglo-Saxon” inside the European project. The tax burden fell as low as 28 per cent in 1994, when the nation was a member of not just any EU, but one run by Jacques Delors, whose European Commission was seen by UK tabloids as a vector for socialism.
It is outside the club that Britain has felt the hand of government most. In the 1960s, the UK’s tax burden was as high as Scandinavia’s. Now it is going up again, and without the consolation of art as good and as caustic as the Beatles’ “Taxman”.
There was, and is, a sound nationalist or traditionalist case for Brexit. Formal sovereignty allows Britain to subsidise domestic industries and make steep cuts in immigration.
Those things have not happened, of course, in large part because they are awful ideas. But the conceptual possibility was there. The Shire reactionary, the nativist in the deindustrialised town: I regret their Leave vote, but I can’t fault the internal logic of it.
What never existed was a sound liberal or free-market case for Brexit. There were not enough opportunities elsewhere in the world to make up for lost European trade.
There were not enough growth-sapping EU regulations to throw aside. Politicians of a pro-market bent who voted Leave should be pressed until the end of their careers to say what on earth they thought they were doing.
The Prime Minister is a good place to start. As mitigation for his tax rises, he is entitled to cite the cost of fiscal relief during the pandemic and the secondary effects of the war in Ukraine. At all turns, however, the question comes back: does Brexit make the problem better or worse?
Even there, with the higher taxes, the Anglo-European convergence doesn’t end. For generations, one thing Britain had over much of the continent was civic order.
How amusing were the many prime ministers of Italy, the many republics of France. It was not for the salons that Voltaire came to England. What the nation lacked in painting or classical music, it redressed in the higher art of politics.
Now? Britain has had five premiers in six years. (The previous five were spread across 31 years.) MPs who would have been quarantined on the backbenches a decade ago get to be home secretary.
Before it is anything else, Brexit is a human resources problem. It turfed out a generation of plodding but conscientious politicians and elevated some feral ones.
The result has been a hardening of the soft corruption that was always a part of the British system. Yes, sections of the media have long carried water for the Tory party. But the sycophancy under Boris Johnson would, were it to happen in a continental country, convince the same Tories that Europe is alien and irredeemable.
Bad convergence is still convergence, though.
Thanks in part to Brexit, Britain is evolving a polity more like that of a young Mediterranean democracy, a tax burden more like that of a Nordic social market and a currency more like the single European one.
Those of us who always wanted a continental future for Britain must not now be churls. We must give credit where it has been so strenuously earned. Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Vote Leave, assorted hedgies: behold your legacy. And thank you.
-By Janan Ganesh
© Financial Times
